


Irregularities

by Shampain



Category: Luther (TV), Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-12
Updated: 2013-01-12
Packaged: 2017-11-25 04:37:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/635189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shampain/pseuds/Shampain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alice runs into her distant cousin, Jim, while enjoying a morning coffee - turns out he has someone special on his mind. One Shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Irregularities

Alice was up early. She didn’t sleep much. Just enough to get by, to operate at her best capacity. She wasn’t sure if she genuinely liked to control things; by now it was an ingrained habit, something she did, another facet of her lifestyle. It all paled in comparison to her studies and her work and especially the universe that seemed to swirl inside of her skull. It was a darkness she sometimes felt was more expansive than the extent of space itself. How easy to get lost inside of it.

 

The peculiarity of her existence was one she cherished. She did feel like an irregularity sometimes, walking down the street, riding the Tube. Like her presence was only registered when she drew another’s attention; otherwise she was a shadow, a shade that moved through the cracks and slipped away with a breeze. Her parents maddened her, they blared a light so brightly on her that there was no mistaking anything she did, and every bit of her that was false stood out, did not belong. Sometimes she went home on Sundays to have dinner with them and it was always such a painful affair, where she smiled and accepted their praise and their suggestions for her future. Something would be done about it soon. They wanted her to be famous. She wanted to simply exist in a flickering, questionable state. Blink and she was gone. Blink again, and so was everything else.

 

It was raining outside. She liked how the windows of the café fogged up when there were so many people inside of it. She did that; liked things. She didn’t like her sandwich, but she still ate some of it. It was nice when food was an enjoyable, almost sexual experience. But sometimes it wasn’t, and on those occasions she fed herself and ended it at that.

 

“Is this seat taken?” said a voice. It was very familiar.

 

She looked up, and allowed herself a smile she didn’t feel, but that was how the world liked her. “Jim,” she said. “Of course not. It has been awhile.”

 

Jim. A second cousin of her father’s. He was a thin man, not sharp in face but sharp in body and he dressed himself to match. The last time she had seen him had been her sixteenth birthday party, and her parents had gathered as much of the family together as possible. People they barely spoke to anymore, but did that matter when their daughter was a certified genius? Bragging rights were to be had.

 

Jim had arrived and Alice had felt a dark cloud around him. He’d given her a kiss of congratulations on the cheek, and he smelt of some subtle cologne, and something bitter. Even then she’d recognized him as a sexual creature, not in any interest of her own, but as one recognizes a similar emptiness, a similar appetite.

 

“Your parents are so lucky,” he’d said, and she’d felt his mockery as intensely as a slap in the face, not that it pained her, “to have a genius in the family.”

 

The size and scale of a star would cause other objects to orbit around it. Often Alice felt like one such star, with the rest of the world revolving around her, at varying degrees of speeds and angles. Jim seemed like something else; a comet burning itself through the darkness, perhaps. She could see him coming at her now, in a halo of fire.

 

Today he had an espresso, and not much else. Not a man who carried anything. Perhaps he had other people’s hands to do most of the carrying for him. He wasn’t a lazy man, she could see, but not one who moved unless he had to, or wanted to. And suits like that could get wrecked very easily.

 

She felt soft, amorphous in comparison to him, in her cashmere and trousers. But she didn’t mind that. She sank back in her chair and smiled at him, knowing that with her wide mouth, a smile could have quite the impression.

 

“What a family we are,” Jim said, in his loose, undulating way of talking. He’d been a young man when she’d seen him last, and he seemed to her a young man still. “How have your studies been going?”

 

“Endless,” she said. He smiled back at her.

 

A shark in deep water. Alice wasn’t afraid – she feared little. Evil fascinated her, left her breathless. She wasn’t sure, though, how cousin Jim registered on the scale of things. Did he think about her as she did him? She knew that he was different, like she was; perhaps there was some strain in her father’s grandfather’s DNA, something that produced irregularities like her, and Jim. He was a predator, though, one which liked to maintain its spot at the top of the food chain. If he thought her to be troublesome, he might very well remove her.

 

But there was no chance of that. Alice floated like a ghost. Could one kill the dead?

 

“What’s in the papers these days?” he asked. She held up her newspaper, where a thin-faced man in black and white tried to hide his face.

 

“Murder,” she said. “You look pale, Jim. Something must be wrong. You in love?”

 

“Love causes paleness, then?”

 

“So I hear.” She put down her newspaper in favour of her cup and took a sip. She watched him take the paper and rifled through it, movements sleek and somehow chaotic. He was like a dead tree in a November wind. “Love has its physical repercussions, after all, besides those of the libido. How is your appetite?”

 

“The same.”

 

“Ah.” She tipped her head to the side and smiled at him. She wondered what their age difference was. She had never been told and thus, had never been given the tools to remember. And researching Jim’s past had not been a particularly desirous pastime. “Perhaps love is in order, then.”

 

“I would have thought you under the belief it doesn’t exist.”

 

“It doesn’t. But one can trick one’s brain into believing anything, these days. It is a self belief, isn’t it? A delusion propagated by our surroundings, fed through our own loneliness.”

 

“I’m never lonely.”

 

“Then perhaps it is impossible.” She flicked a bit of nothing from her sleeve. “Continue being pale, then.”

 

“Have you heard of a man named Sherlock Holmes?”

 

“I’ve read of him. Is that who you are in love with?”

 

“I want him to implode. I want to see his thoughts burst right out of his skull. I want to polish his bones until they gleam in the three hours of sunlight we get each year. And then I want to leave what’s left in his landlady’s bed.”

 

Alice tapped a fingernail against the tabletop, vaguely surprised by that, but not entirely. He was only voicing thoughts she already knew, deep inside. What a mad creature he was. On her sixteenth birthday he’d given her a necklace on which was strung a single, black pearl. Its mystery was infuriating. A simple store purchase, or ripped from the neck of someone long dead? He’d smiled far too wide when she had put it on. Her parents had thought it a lovely gesture. But then again, they would.

 

How upset he must be, to seek her out (for this could not be a coincidence) just to let this out. He who was invisible more often than not, just like her, suddenly coming out into the open, adding a voice and a body to crimes and deviancy. She would pretend not to understand, not to know, to perhaps even be a little bit scared. She knew his type, and they were very different people from her. His narcissism perhaps outshone her own. She would play stupid; and he would see stupid. After all, for her to realize he was upset would be an invitation to be his next obsession. Be boring, Alice. Then he will leave you alone, in the dark, where you want to be.

 

“It looks like you’ll have to crawl over half of London, first,” she said, after a pause she made awkward by staring at her sandwich. “He is amassing quite a fan club.”

 

“One can easily step over the dead.”

 

“I wouldn’t know.”

 

“No, of course not.” He checked his Rolex. Despite his relative calm he still seemed chaotic to her, like he might explode in a burst of movement. She waited for the bullet, and it never came. He smiled at her and raised his eyebrows in a twisted exaggeration of a movement, drank his espresso, and stood up. He was back to his abnormality. “What a good talk, Alice. We’ll have to see each other again sometime.”

 

“Naturally.” She presented her face to him while he bent to kiss her as he had so many years ago, turning her head to give him her cheek, and not the soft, fragile flesh of her throat. “Goodbye, Jim.”

 

“Goodbye.”

 

She watched through the window where, as soon as he stepped outside, someone casually passing in the street handed him their umbrella without missing a beat. He set off in the opposite direction, one black shape bobbing among many. Alice fiddled with the corner of her newspaper, looking down at the amateur sleuth’s profile, his high, sharp cheekbone, and dark piercing eye just visible beneath his tousle of hair. A different universe from hers, one inhabited by creatures like and unlike herself. She wasn’t interested in them, cared only for the silent, cold world her own mind inhabited.

 

Without another thought to spare for him, she moved to a different article.


End file.
